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When it comes to putting the pressure on the Senate to stand against retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreakers, bloggers have taken a vital lead. They helped inspire Chris Dodd to pledge a hold on any Senate bill that contains an amnesty, and prompted Barack Obama's recent unequivocal opposition to immunity.

These key bloggers have joined together to send a letter to Harry Reid, urging him to honor Sen. Dodd's hold and stop the immunity legislation currently moving through the Senate. The full letter is at www.noretroactiveimmunity.com. You can add you own name to the letter there (and join EFF, the ACLU, Working Assets and many prominent figures in the Democratic netroots.) And don't forget to visit Stop The Spying to call your representatives and urge them to use their vote to oppose telecom immunity in Congress.

A recently completed investigation into copyright's effect on media literacy education resulted in the following criticism: lack of knowledge and poor policies inhibit the teaching of critical thinking and communication skills.

When a key Senate committee voted Thursday to include retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreakers in new legislation, they may not have been prepared for the rising tide of criticism coming their way. Newspaper editorial boards and legal scholars from around the country, normally cautious and reserved, are speaking out in increasingly urgent terms about the threat to the rule of law posed by the immunity provisions. If the bill becomes law it will let phone companies off the hook for their participation in the NSA’s massive and illegal wiretapping program.

We recently published a one-page document summarizing the evidence that is the centerpiece of EFF's Hepting v. AT&T case. Information for the document came from previously secret evidence that was unsealed this summer, including the declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and EFF's expert witness, J. Scott Marcus, a former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission. The document includes the following diagram, a straightforward illustration of how a massive portion of innocent Americans' communications were put under the control of the NSA:

Yesterday, we posted about some experiments showing that Comcast is forging packets in order to interfere with its customers' use of BitTorrent. There have been reports of strange things happening with other protocols, and we've been running some tests on two other file transfers protocols in particular — HTTP (which is used by the World Wide Web) and Gnutella. Comcast has also been strenuous in telling us, "we don't target BitTorrent". Perhaps not. Perhaps what they're doing is even worse.

In the limited tests we ran, we didn't see any interference with HTTP traffic. Comcast's network seems to behave correctly when you run a private web server and share a few of your photos or videos over it (we tested files up to about 25MB).

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence approved a bill including amnesty for phone companies that assisted the NSA in its illegal warrantless surveillance program late Thursday -- amnesty that is intended to kill pending cases against the telecoms such as EFF's class action lawsuit against AT&T.